Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Illumination on Global Warming.

Reading Forty Signs of Rain, an ecologcial/global warming thriller [though I'm going to have to use thriller very lightly here] and biking to work in the rain this AM, it struck me that [at least] one of the things that bugs me about the environmental/global warming movement is this: the climate is changing - regardless of whether your opinion on it says it's good science or bad science - and the response seems to be that the movement wants to stop change. "Stop Global Warming!" But you can't stop change. Change is constant. Trying to stop change is evolutionary failure. To be evolutionarily successful, as an individual or a species, you adapt to change. Does it strike no one else, on its face, as absurd that we're trying to control the environment? If it's raining, you don't look for ways to make it stop raining, you get an umbrella. Or go indoors.

Weird control freak-ish mentality. To me, anyways.

And it's odd, because I support most of the things that the "save the world" types do... We should get off of oil, just for the geopolitical reasons alone... we should reduce, reuse, recycle and move to cleaner fuels, just because you don't foul your nest, as it were [that's just common sense, really...] and the pressure for the modern lifestyle and the accumulation of stuff is less and less appealing to me as I get older... But the idea of doing all that so we can "save the world" or "control the environment" strikes me as nuts. You can't control the environment - be it the actual enviroment or just the environment of your situations in life - you can never "control for all the variables." And trying to control anything but yourself leads to frustration and failure. IMHO.

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